A new study partially funded by NASA and the Canadian government has found that rising sea levels make each day a little longer, with no signs of it stopping.

This research paper conducted by researchers in Canada, the United States, and Switzerland was published today, and it examined the final impacts of climate change on the physics of the planet itself.

Study co-author Surendra Adhikari said in an interview with CTVNews.ca: "Each day has a slightly different length, due to many factors, including... climate change," stressing that "this... is a testament to the seriousness of ongoing climate change."

The pale blue dot

The relationship between carbon emissions and our cosmic ballet choreography goes back to something that most of Earth's inhabitants consider a given: the shape of the planet.

Contrary to popular belief, Earth is not actually a perfect sphere. While the Earth's surface around the globe is remarkably smooth on a planetary scale, what most people forget to take into account is water; and in particular, how that water moves.

As the planet spins on its axis, the distribution of Earth's oceans is affected by this force, and like in centrifuges, the fluid is pushed outward from the center, especially near the equator.

As a result, the Earth and its oceans bulge, and everything in between forms not a sphere, but a shape scientists refer to as an oblate spheroid. This flattening or size of the bulge at the equator is crucial to the findings that Adhikari and his colleagues have reached.

In short, as higher global temperatures melt polar ice caps, more of the Earth's water supply turns to liquid, allowing it to expand the oblate bulge along the equator, where it could have previously remained trapped in ice.

This swelling, in turn, changes the dynamics of how Earth spins in the first place, and the rotation is always slowing down.

Adhikari explained: "If you see how a skater controls their movement... if they need to slow down, they just extend their arms or legs, and it’s basically the same concept." "It's all about conserving angular momentum."

A matter of milliseconds

Although days are measured by a uniform length of 86,400 seconds each, the actual time it takes for a point on Earth's surface to complete a full rotation has become a little longer, at a rate that scientists say could become more alarming as climate change risks worsen.

For Earth's age, a 24-hour day is relatively new, a height reached after billions of years of growth. Five hundred million years ago, a complete night and day cycle may have lasted only 22 hours total; a billion years before that, scientists estimate it was around 19 hours.

Historically, the rate of increase attributed to climate change was slow, averaging between 0.3 and one millisecond per day every 100 years from 1900 to 2000. But as the aftereffects of the Industrial Revolution intensified, the rate rose to nearly 1.33 milliseconds per day, per century, since the dawn of the millennium.

Adhikari and his colleagues found that in a high emissions scenario, by 2100, it could exceed 2.5 milliseconds, marking the first time that humanity's impact on Earth's rotation could be greater than that of the Moon and tides.

The study concluded that "over Earth's geological evolution, tidal friction with the Moon has been the primary driver of... the increase in [day length]."

"However, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, the increase in warming of the atmosphere and oceans, along with associated ice melt, will lead to a much higher rate... of becoming the most significant contribution to long-term changes in day length."

Is it time for a new clock?

Practically, a few extra milliseconds a day over a human lifetime isn’t the most pressing impact of climate change, although Adhikari points out that computer systems, which rely on 86,400 seconds per day, may require adjustments as climate change progresses. The complexities of time start to go out of sync.

This is an issue that physicists and computer scientists have watched since the 1970s, with it long being understood that it sometimes necessitates adding an extra "leap second" to atomic clock counting to avoid widespread logistical problems.

According to a recent study by UC San Diego, the effects of climate change on Earth's rotation may complicate the timing and how those leap seconds are included; another piece of the perplexing global puzzle.

The study stated: "This will pose an unprecedented problem for computer network timing." "Global warming is already affecting universal timekeeping."

Whether Earth’s rotation will lead to its own mini Y2K scenario anytime soon, Adhikari says the findings of NASA's study serve as a symbol of humanity's impact on our planet, as within just a few hundred years of industrialization, the side effects may one day surpass those of the massive celestial body hanging in our night sky.

He said, "It’s really profound." "In a way, we’ve messed with our climate system so much that we’re witnessing its effect on how our Earth spins... a tiny human, doing some silly things, causing that."